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Comment: William Kay: Lloyds boss brings some showbiz dazzle to the high street

LLOYDS TSB has hired its very own Matt Barrett, and I predict a fairground ride for the bank’s customers, although it is too early to say if it will turn out to be a haunted house or a merry-go-round.

But whatever happens Terri Dial, Lloyds’s new retail banking director, is going to make her rivals sit up. And that can only be to the good.

The parallels with Barrett, the 60-year-old chairman of Barclays, are eerie. Son of a band leader, Barrett began as a teller and made his way up the banking ladder in North America. At the time he landed in London he had retired from his previous bank and was detaching himself from a marriage to a nude model.

Dial, 55, rose from teller to boardroom in a 28-year career with Wells Fargo in San Francisco. Nude modelling does not appear on her CV, but she too